Fulke Greville at PPS

 Tomorrow's scheduled meeting of Portsmouth Poetry Society was due to be my contribution to the programme, on the subject of Fulke Greville. In the circumstances, these meetings have been taking place with some success by e-mail and so I'll be sending out my succinct introduction tomorrow. 

But waste not, want not. It might be of interest to one or two further afield. I dare say my enthusiasm for Greville owes a big debt to Thom Gunn. I don't know how many times I've made something one of my favourites through the recommendation, or following up a connection from others. The Magnetic Fields, Patrick Hamilton, August Kleinzahler and any number of others became essential to me by having been important to somebody else that I thought must 'know something'.

So, lds & gnlmn, Green on Greville, for what it's worth.

-

Fulke Greville (1554-1628)

There were 87 names on Wikipedia’s list of candidates for who wrote the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare the last time I looked. Fulke Greville, the second Lord Brooke, who lived roughly at the right time and in Warwickshire is one of them, and one of the more accomplished writers, but it is still highly unlikely that he was responsible for Shakespeare. They might have met or been known to each other is as close as the connection gets.

Fulke Greville owned Warwick Castle that his father had bought in 1601 but also had a house in Alcester where he probably spent most of his time. He won a by-election to become the MP for Southampton in 1580 but after that was declared invalid, he briefly sat for a Yorkshire constituency before being the MP for Warwickshire with any number of other official positions whether they involved much work or not.

He wrote the first biography of Sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan courtier, soldier and sonnet writer, who was a close friend. Apparently highly regarded by Elizabeth I, he more than once was on his way to Europe to take part in the latest fighting but was called back to London by the Queen. But possibly the most interesting thing about him was that he was murdered by a servant who thought he was inadequately provided for in Greville’s will. On a visit to London, the servant stabbed him twice and left him to die, which he didn’t immediately do, and then went elsewhere to stab himself four times more successfully.

There are plays and some political poetry but Greville’s poetry that remains most readily available is his collection Caelica (*), which Neil Powell describes as a Collected Shorter Poems rather than a ‘sonnet sequence’ because only XLI out of CIX are sonnets anyway.

The early poems in Caelica might be called love poems. As Thom Gunn points out,

Nowadays the journalistic critical cliché about a young poet is to say that ‘he has found his own voice’, the emphasis being on differentness, on the uniqueness of his voice, on the fact that he sounds like nobody else. But the Elizabethans at their best as well as at their worst are always sounding like each other. They did not search much for uniqueness of voice:

In VII, the world changes but the beloved is constant,

Man made of earth, and for whom earth is made,

Still dying lives, and living ever dieth,

        Only like fate sweet Myra never varies,

        Yet in her eyes the doom of all change carries.

And that early intimation of ‘doom’ echoes throughout Greville’s dark view of human life.

In X, feeling rejected, he despairs that,

What dazzling brightness hath your beams benighted,

       That fall’n thus from those joys which you aspired,

       Down to my darkened mind you are retired?

And decides that ‘those sweet glories’,

Must, as Ideas, only be embraced,

    Since excellence in other forms enjoyed,

     Is by descending to her saints destroyed.

Man’s degraded condition is corrupt, vain and absurd and can only find salvation in God.

C despairs at the ‘witty tyranny’ of being trapped in a prison of one’s own thought,

In night when colours all to black are cast,

Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;

The eye a watch to inward senses placed,

Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

 

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,

Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,

Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence,

Doth forge and raise impossibility:

 

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,

Proper reflections of the error be,

And images of self-confusednesses,

Which hurt imaginations only see;

 

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,

Which but expressions be of inward evils.

One of the longest poems is CII, which finds Hell in human consciousness, and sin is a ‘Little-ease’.

‘Little Ease’ was a prison cell located beneath the White Tower in the Tower of London. The lightless cell was designed 1.2 metres (3 ft 11 in) on a side, meaning that while an adult human could be placed inside, any occupant was prevented from being able to either stand, sit, or lie down, meaning it was impossible for him to find any physical position of rest.

CIX, the last poem, prays,

Yet Lord let Israel’s plagues not be eternal

…

       Rather, sweet Jesus, fill up time and come,

       To yield the sin her everlasting doom.

 

Religion was politics, too, in C17th England and Greville’s Protestantism is possibly Calvinist in its devotion. But his politics were pragmatic, too, possibly seeing the benefit of at least superficially siding with the king’s favourite, Buckingham, who was otherwise not popular. George Villiers was assassinated in Portsmouth High Street, just across the road from the cathedral, only a few weeks before the murder of Greville.

Greville had planned a double tomb for himself and Sir Philip Sidney in St. Paul’s Cathedral but that was never built. Instead, he has an outsize memorial in St. Mary’s Church, Warwick.

* If anybody has any ideas about whether to pronounce Caelica as ‘kai-lee-ka’ or ‘ce-leeka’ or any other way, I’d love to know.

Bibliography

Fulke Greville, Selected Poems, edited by Neil Powell (Carcanet)

Thom Gunn, Introduction to Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, in The Occasions of Poetry (Faber)

Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628, A Critical Biography (Routledge & Kegan Paul)